Lucius Cornelius Sulla broke through the city walls on March 1, 86 BC, somewhere in the vicinity of the Kerameikos. Incensed, perhaps partly by Aristion’s taunting, the general unleashed his army on the weakened, helpless Athenians. Many inhabitants were massacred, fires destroyed residential areas and the city’s wealth was carried away. Plutarch reports that blood flowed in the streets and out the Dipylon Gate. The Acropolis took several more weeks to conquer but it, too, eventually fell; Aristion was captured and executed, and Athens sank into a period of severe economic decline.

He went on to become dictator in Rome in late 82 BC but retired from public life about two years later. Pausanias records he died from a terrible disease (see below) that may have been divine punishment brought on not by his cruel treatment of the Athenians but by the killing of Aristion in the sanctuary of Athena, perhaps even inside the Parthenon. Other historians suggest Sulla was simply a hard drinker whose liver finally succumbed. Sulla’s lack of compassion for ancient Athens was uncharacteristic of later Roman leaders, especially emperors Augustus and Hadrian, whose numerous benefactions left a more positive stamp upon the Athenian landscape.

Sulla’s brutality in Greece during Rome’s war against Mithridates VI became legendary, as did the general’s apparently well-deserved ultimate fate. Second-century AD Roman traveler Pausanias relates: “Sulla, who was so savage and so un-Roman at Athens, was the same at Thebes and Orchomenus; he went to work even at Alalcomenae [in Boeotia], looting the very statue of Athena. This man who was so mad against the cities and the gods of Greece was gripped by the most horrible disease there is: He died seething with maggots. His early apparent good luck came round to so terrible an end.”